Saul Anuzis and his bride sat around the kitchen table. It was not a pretty sight. On one hand the former state GOP chair knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to run for Congress.

But the data was irrefutable: 4 kids in college, a hefty home mortgage, and the normal costs of staying alive.

The math did not add up. They could not afford it.

So he did what any self-respecting Michigander would do. He bought three daily lottery tickets for a dollar apiece. If he hit the jackpot, he’d run. If not, he’d be left to ponder what might have been.

Nowadays the former Michigan Republican Party chair ponders.

Mr. Anuzis, had he run for the 8th Congressional seat, might have made it interesting in that some of his views would most certainly have angered the far right of his beloved party.

While he would vote no on an amendment to make same-sex marriage legal, he is open to the concept if it was taken out of the religious arena and permitted in the governmental realm.

“It should be fair for all…nobody should be discriminated against,” he explains.

Well then what about expanding the state’s civil rights law to include gay persons? “No one should be fired from a job or denied housing because they are gay,” and even though he has not read the Elliot-Larsen Act he believes “in principle” lawmakers should bring the LGBT community under the act’s anti-discriminatory umbrella.

“I know some of this will upset the base,” Mr. Anuzis confessed after taping Off the Record. But heck, he’s not running for anything and that allows him to speak his mind without fear of retribution.

Less you conclude this is some wild-eyed liberal Republican left over from the Milliken days of a more moderate state GOP, this is pretty much the same Saul Anuzis who entered the game in 1982. He has stayed the same, but his party has marched right past him off into the far right weeds, leaving him to look more moderate than the rest.

To hammer home the point that he is different, when they were debating the anti-gay-marriage amendment in Michigan, some conservatives complained that allowing that would damage traditional marriages.

“That’s absurd,” Mr. Anuzis says giving those to the right another reason not to like him.

He says if you really want to go after what is destroying traditional marriages, he suggests doing something about divorce.

You see why he would have had a tough time getting to Congress if he had hit the lottery.

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